Television

‘Isn’t Naples beautiful? I’ve always dreamt about it. I always wanted this city all for myself; I didn’t want to share it… I alone deserved it because of everything I lost and I would have done anything to get it.’ So says Ciro Di Marzio – nicknamed ‘the immortal’ because he has survived so much mafia bloodletting – in the hit TV crime drama Gomorrah.   He is not talking about the churches or castles, the arcades or theatres or museums. He may have been out on the bay at night when the words are uttered, but the Naples he knows, grew up in and by then controls is the Naples of Scampia and Secondigliano, places up on the ridgeline of the city: the Naples of high rises and concrete, the Naples of drugs and murder.

As the credits rolled on the series finale of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, things got awkward. My partner turned to me to express his excitement for series two – just as I realised with absolute certainty that I couldn’t, in good conscience, watch the show again. My reaction came as a shock – to both of us. Hours earlier, I’d been champing at the bit to see the final instalment. Yes, the Amazon Prime programme has been widely panned by critics for everything from the CGI to the ‘colour-blind’ casting, but we’d loved it. In fact, it’s the first full series we’ve made it through as a couple, which only added to the disappointment of my decision. So, what led me here – to feelings of remorse so strong that The Rings are powerless?

There on my television screen, in a somewhat surreal sequence, was Boris Johnson contemplating the women in his life. And suddenly before me appeared the famous Wyatt features: first eyes, then a nose and then a mouth, right into camera. Medium-range shot and then a close-up. Ah, we had faces then. And then I looked harder, and my blood turned to Freon. It was just a large photograph of me stuck on a 10ft projector screen. Couldn’t those cheapskates at Sky have got a goddamn actress instead of a Polaroid?  As it turns out, This England, the Kenneth Branagh series about my old friend Boris, is more Psycho than psychodrama. Someone in the make-up department seems to have thought they were remaking What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

You almost have to feel sorry for Sky. After spending 18 months building up to their big Boris Johnson drama, they end up releasing it at exactly the same time that British politics enters its own cliffhanger mode with drama that could rival any season finale. This England – which tells the story of the start of Johnson’s premiership and the first wave of the Covid crisis – begins tonight on Sky Atlantic, starring Kenneth Branagh as Johnson and Ophelia Lovibond as Carrie. But should Sky have known better than to air it now? Generally the best real-life dramas follow a simple rule of thumb: time is on your side. Rather than rush out your first draft of history, much better to wait until the dust has settled – even if you do have Branagh on board.

Why is Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings show taking so much flak? The way I see it, there are two (mostly separate) factors at play: Tolkien fandom and race. First, Tolkien fandom. Despite the best efforts of the Tolkien Society to 'queer' Tolkien studies, the Inkling’s biggest admirers tend to be Christians on the cultural and political right. Most of this crowd (aside from those who think hating universally beloved things is a good substitute for a personality) loved Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. His adaptation of The Hobbit, which took plenty of liberties in order to stretch about 300 pages into three feature films, was less well received.

If you were one of the many millions who watched Top Gun: Maverick this year, it may have been a pleasant surprise to see Jon Hamm in the (admittedly thankless) role of Vice Admiral Simpson, who has to look stern and angry at the various transgressions committed by Tom Cruise’s protagonist. Hamm has been cornering the market in these sorts of roles thanks to his appearance of square-jawed rectitude. He is a natural fit for FBI agents, police detectives, and, indeed, vice admirals. But it was a different kind of vice altogether that he followed in his best-known and most beloved role, that of the dynamically charismatic – yet entirely fraudulent – Don Draper, advertising executive extraordinaire in Matthew Weiner’s cult series Mad Men, which was first broadcast 15 years ago.

‘What did the rampant chimp have to do with any of it?’ I squawked in bewildered disappointment to a friend at the end of Nope, the long-awaited third film from Oscar-winning writer-director Jordan Peele. I had hastened in great excitement to see Nope on the first day of its cinema release, hoping for a work that would rival Peele’s sparkling debut Get Out in its idiosyncratic mash-up of razor-sharp social commentary and horror. Instead, I paid £14.20 to sit through 130 minutes of barely explained peril that were resolved in a manner that was even less clear. Peele, I concluded sadly, had crossed over to the dark side of artists who appear to believe that it is fashionable to be incomprehensible.

On a recent trip from London to New Delhi, I found out that an acquaintance I see once or twice a year had pulled out of her wedding just 24 hours before the ceremony. An almighty row? Infidelity? Good old-fashioned cold feet? No – her family had simply decided they weren’t happy with the groom and decided to pull the plug. Welcome to the world of arranged marriages. As a woman who was born and grew up in India, arranged marriages – those planned and agreed by the families of the couple, rather than due to the romantic inclinations of the couple themselves – have never made sense to me. But they remain the norm in many South Asian communities. In a 2018 survey of more than 160,000 Indian households, 93 per cent of married couples said theirs was an arranged marriage.

‘Who are these people and why should we care about them?' This is the most important question any screenwriter must ask before committing pen to paper. Sadly it's a question I failed to come anywhere near answering during the interminable 'realism' of the BBC’s much discussed (and much praised) Marriage. Sean Bean and Nicola Walker play Ian and Emma, an uptight midlife couple caught in the tedium of marital graft after 27 years together. The four-part 'drama' has been widely commended for showing the profound inanity of ordinary people's domestic lives. While I consider myself to be pretty ordinary, I failed to recognise either of these dullards as anything other than famous actors trying to appear real and failing miserably.

From time to time, Netflix’s marketing brains like to get a bit cute with the company’s past. ‘Don’t give up on your dreams – we started with DVDs,’ read one recent viral post. But while the streaming giant happily references its most famous transition, it’s much more coy (and probably wisely) when it comes to its latest one. It isn’t hard to see that 2022 Netflix is a very different beast to the one most of us signed up for. If you joined Netflix during its peak – e.g. somewhere in the long window between House of Cards and Tiger King – you would have likely bought into the idea of it being a one-stop shop for all things streaming. But has it really kept that promise?